The four major Western sprachraums are those of English, Spanish, Portuguese and French (according to the number of speakers). The English sprachraum spans the globe, from the United Kingdom, Ireland, United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand to the many former British colonies where English has official language status alongside local languages, such as India and South Africa. The French sprachraum, which also spans several continents, is known as the Francophonie (French: La francophonie). La Francophonie is also the name of an international organisation composed of countries with French as an official language.

Even within a single sprachraum, there can be different, but closely related, languages, otherwise known as dialect continua. A classic example is the Chinese languages, which can be mutually unintelligible in spoken form, but belong to the same language family and have a unified non-phonetic writing system. Arabic has a similar situation, but its writing system is partly phonetic (an abjad) and there is a common literary language (Modern Standard Arabic).